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The main goal of this article is to identify and critically examine the foundations of the monetary theories to which Lowndes and Locke appealed during their debate around the Great Recoinage of 1696. In the course of the investigation I came by the critical commentaries of Sir James Steuart and Karl Marx on the views of Locke and Lowndes on monetary theory. As these highly valuable commentaries are nearly absent from the standard literature, I present and critically assess them in this essay.

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In this paper, the author critically analysed a unique passage of Pigou's 1933 “The Theory of Unemployment”. Here he is faced with a fundamental theoretical problem in the definition of the national dividend or national income, which has far-reaching consequences on the comprehension of the circulation of money. Pigou is one of the few economists who have noticed this problem and discussed it in the history of economics. The problem can be stated as follows: the part of the value of output that makes up for depreciation; is or is not up for division? Does or does not it become income (that is, wages and profits) in the aggregate? The passage analysed in this paper is exceptional in the history of economics. It is so, first, because it faces the problem. Secondly, but no less important, because Pigou, despite his hesitations, holds the nowadays minoritarian position that the value of the part of the output that makes up for depreciation does not become income for any economic factor. This view implies that this part of the output is not up for division and, therefore, is not a part of aggregate income.

This paper intends to provide a comprehensive and critical survey of the valuable but neglected contributions of Fritz Machlup to the debate on the Transfer Problem. Machlup took three different and conflicting lines of approach to the problem in the course of his lifelong study of it. The third, which is of a basically monetary character, provides original results, especially in relation to the demand-oriented and quantitative approach that dominates in the standard literature.